"Make Undergraduates 'More Interesting People'"

"Higher Education points out some of the pernicious consequences of this shift. Colleges spend scads of money to make their campuses as spiffy as suburbia. The ratio of administrators to students has mushroomed, with such new positions as sustainability director, credential specialist, vice president of student success, and coordinator of learning-immersion experiences. Meanwhile, assert Hacker and Dreifus, faculty are paid handsomely for the hours they put into teaching (a claim based on a dubious calculation of professors' hourly pay). Especially in the leading universities, the tenured class is left to do its own thing, with the scut work of teaching largely carried out by adjuncts and teaching assistants. That's a bad deal for students: According to a large-scale 2008 study cited by Hacker and Dreifus, the more students are taught by itinerants, the more likely they are to drop out. At New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, among other highly ranked schools, the TAs who lead sections are undergraduates--is this what $40,000-plus tuition should buy?"

In The American Prospect, David L. Kirp reviews Jonathan R. Cole's The Great American University: Its Rise to Prominence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected and Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus's Higher Education: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids.